So what I thought was someone hammering on Sunday night was actually someone banging on the wall of one of my near neighbours in an effort to get them to quieten down. I had no idea. And would have probably stayed that way until I got an e-mail from another neighbour.

This is the hell of living the way so many of us do cheek by jowl in multi-occupancy buildings. Your comfort and peace of mind is forever predicated on someone's else behaviour. You can never be assured of peace and quiet. I don't think I've really slept well for months. It's a hovering fear. Will it? Won't it?

I've felt this way about several public places, including this particular one: ' He told me that he tried to think of Grand Central Station as his apartment. One room but a nice size. High ceiling. Nice big window. Marble floor. Centrally located...a little bit noisy and could be more heat. But the high ceiling made up for everything'.

From Great Jones Street by Don Delilo.

I came across one of the most apposite adjectives ever used about New York as I was bouncing along the central line to Oxford Circus this morning. Vulval. NYC in one word: fertile, rich, earthy, forbidden, dense, sultry, steaming, lush, tropical, glistening.

It pairs up so well with another unusual adjective Don Delilo used - I'm reading Great Jones Street - one of his earlier, somewhat keatsian cum gritty urbanism prose rich novels - which is where  I stumbled over vulval.

And that other word is feculent. The antithesis of vulval, which is health and fertility; this is the reverse,the dreck, the sludge, the gunk, the muck of a great city.

Both words capture an intangible particularity about New York, a smell, a mood, a tension, a resonance, a frisson.

London is as vulval and as feculent as New York. After all, we are siblings, soul mates rendered apart only by geography and climate.

Climate is the operative word. New York has the grand gesture weather; those retreat from Moscow winters along with stunning, nigh on apocalyptic events a la Hurricane Sandy; London suffers neither...yet...climate change could herald all sorts of meteorological naughtiness, but what do we have, and right now, is soul sapping, harrowing cold.

I was bird watching along one of the Thames's loneliest estuaries this afternoon in the rawest, coldest wind I've experienced in years. Only now is blood pumping properly to all extremities. But worth it. Terry and I had a treasure trove of birds open up to us, waders of all sizes, scurrying along the mudflats, with acrobatic turnstones sweeping across the water like marine swallows with three magisterial kestrels hovering above the nearby reed beds. Vulval.

A frantic, often fraught week that I could have happily done without; Wednesday particularly, I crawled home then, beaten and wildly exasperated. But that's all in the past.

A number of beautiful things floated across the last yesterday and today: two quite blissful days in Sheffield and being reunited with an old love.

The steel city: it could be Rome or San Francisco with all those hills, steeper for every Sheffielder to be as a lean and muscular as goats...except so many are n't; and at night, eerily like night time LA, well it was from my hotel room window.

Reunited with an old love. Not a physical thing...though I felt the stirrings, but the simple chance act of picking up a copy of "Herzog"' Saul Bellow's masterpiece. Just flicking through it was akin to being aroused. I love that book.

This is the first Valentine's Day where I've seen more men carrying sprays of flowers or a single red rose than I have women. Even in the office. Outnumbered. Wonder why that it is? New cultural trend?

Far more men than I've seen before in the two card shops on Cheapside this evening as well. All with the look of something between puzzlement - the what to get conundrum - and near despair. Made me think of that urban folklore of the hapless man trying to chose lingerie for his partner. In the headlights. Frozen.

Though I did somewhat admire the stout man sat on his folded out commuter bike waiting for the lights to turn as I walked across New Change this evening; in his back pack was a tall, almost willowy red rose, cocooned in a plastic sheath, flapping in the light wind. Did that survive the pedal to wherever it was he was heading? Was that going to be his take on the Black Magic chocolate moment...pop off his cycle helmet, run fingers through his air, and bound up the stairs with a rose in his hand?

Yesterday was a day almost custom made for blogging: the pope unexpectedly resigning. I'm sure conspiracy wheels are spinning furiously in some of the more suspect media outlet. Don't be shy, Daily Mail, it's not just you I'm thinking of, but you are the most likely, admit it. Go on. Your tittle tattle mind must be in overdrive; the innuendo, the barb, the non too casual aspersion. the off stage whisper you love so much, and, of course, the all too ready 'source'. We know you want to...

Radio 4 is roughly midway through it's month long George Orwell season - this year is the 110th anniversary of his birth - and last week's Book at Bedtime was 'Down and out in Paris and London'. I remember reading it along with most of Orwell's other works virtually in one clean sweep when I was somewhere in my teens. Maybe I was fifteen, sixteen, I really don't remember. What I do, though, is the utter vividness of his writing, it's simplicity and clarity, and the fact that for me at that time it represented a world I knew little of and had no experience of whatsoever - the sprawling, brawling, anonymous, never still metropolis.

Six or seven years after that clean sweep, I made that transition from a quiet South Yorkshire ex-mining village to London, the uber-city. Not a backward look over my shoulder since.

I love London  It is my home: by spirit; by association; by implicit memory, every stone, every pavement holds a story, even if it is just a fragment its there. It's been and continues to be the palimpsest that I've written the bulk of my life's story on.

And its to people like Orwell - as it to others such as J.B. Priestley, whose novel 'Angel Pavement' galvanised my sense of London as a vast social panorama, where individuals lived intertwined hugger mugger lives, which could be every permutation of circumstance and emotion, exuberant, degrading, humorous, gritty, tenacious, defiant, introspective, but what mattered was that they were alive - that I owe so much.

It's novels that helped me begin to tease out the nooks and crannies of 'the Smoke' in the early days of living here when I only had one day off and had to pack so much into those scarce twenty four hours. How else would I have uncovered Mayfair for instance, if not for reading of Dorian Gray pacing along Audley Street; or Notting Hill through the eyes of Colin Macinnes.

Even Dickens, who I don't particularly enjoy has a place in my fictional London, with his opening paragraph to Bleak House, where the November weather was so elemental that it would n't have been unimaginable to "...meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill...

Without them the road to adventure could have been so much different.

I like this interview. I like it that the interviewer has done due diligence and steeped himself in the works of his novelist interviewee; that's a respect that not every interviewer affords their subjects, not to do that is a rudeness at worst, a gaucheness at best.

I like it that this interview reads like the transcript of a relaxed conversation between friends; there's not a scintilla of fussiness or formality anywhere. It could be a latter day version of that wonderful film, 'Dinner with Andre', with it's warm-hearted centre; with it's generous moods - intellectual, humorous, anecdotal, curious, inquiring (but not it's evil sister - prying); and just as comradely and collegiate as the film. I can almost see them sat down, smiling, rolling back with laughter or bent forward parsing a great work, a poem, a painting before the conversation rolls on another wave to some other topic, tackled just as deliciously.

I've read some interviews which would have tried the patience of angels with the knowingness, or self referencing on the part of the interviewer. Not happening here. This is pure; an uncontaminated interview.

I like it that I've glimpsed into dimensions I don't normally see in my day to day world - the world of creativity and the beauty of being in the "flow". The interviewee says time is effectively inconsequential during those steaming, heighten times when the words pour like lava and just need corralling into sentences. Time truly standing still.

I like it that I've had the rare pleasure of being a friend of the interviewee for well over thirty years. I've lucked out. I feel blessed.

I've never wanted to get married, or to be more honest, I've never expected I would be, and I am still not. But, I've noticed myself wondering over recent weeks what it would have been like. What would my notional wife have been like? Where would we have lived? A mid-terrace in west London, or somewhere further out? Overseas? (God, yes...) Kids? Would I have pushed myself to do well at work? What would it all have been like?

There's always something in London to set your heart racing and keep your spirits up.

On the tube into work yesterday I was sat opposite a young school girl, no more than thirteen, who unlike most girls that age I see on public transport was n't chatting or listening to an i-Pod, or scribbling last minute homework; she was, instead, deep into a weather worn copy of Nancy Mitford's 'Love in a cold climate', rapt with the concentration and focus that only readers know. I was privately delighted; reading is the greatest joy. We travel further than anyone else. No continent, no century, no world is too remote. Anything is possible: we can be any gender, we can be anything in fact.

A few weeks before, I'd been sat in the Pret a Manger in Paternoster Square, working my way through the Guardian and nearing the thought of saddling up and making for the office, when a youngish man - early thirties at most, and as well dressed as most are who work in the City* - sat at the table next to me. So unremarkable and mundane an event that I scarcely took any notice. But I did when I glanced over and saw that he was reading Saul Bellow's 'Herzog' - my favourite book. The one I'll be buried with. I was silently ecstatic; I've never seen anyone, anywhere, with anything by Bellow in their hands. 

Again, someone on that lifetime's journey that reading is. Readers go places.

*I dress badly. It's not quite jester's motley I'm wearing but damn close. Only this afternoon I found myself wandering across the office floor with a hole in my shirt elbow the size of small bomb crater. 

Like so many today I've been enthralled by the confirmation that for several centuries, the body of Richard the Third - the villain, the scheming scuttling monster of Shakespeare's eponymous drama - has lain in an untidy and crude grave underneath that most British of things, the car park.

It's that moment again, where we're able through dogged and scrupulous forensic archeology to lean back and meet the past. Meet the ancestors; and, in this case, see the bones of not just an historical figure, but someone whose cultural power has echoed down the centuries. I am amazed.

The one thing that does stand out for me is the tremendous torsion of his spine, almost an S shape, or the barb of a deformed hook. Life must have been anything but quiet for Richard; he must have been mocked even if it was silently, voices that would n't dare speak, but eyes that certainly could, must have left their mark. Unusual body types still generate stares even today in these more enlightened, sympathetic times. For him it must have been hell.

Traveling on London's public transport is a lottery when it comes to the people you can find yourself sat or stood next to. I think I've experienced most types over the near thirty years I've lived here.

The majority, that great silent crowd of momentary neighbours have been exactly that, silent; there's been the surly - avoid any bus or tube with football fans, especially English in it; the chatterboxes, usually from out of town, who don't know London's informal code of conduct on public transport, the unwritten credo that you shall be silent and uncommunicative - we really are islands, entire of ourselves - or they do, and intentionally set out to talk, self strengthening their folk belief that people in London really are n't friendly.

I've been next to school kids, swivelling around in near riotous mood on the top deck of buses; seen fights break out on a tube; someone been given oral sex; plenty of people weeping; far too many drunks; been up close and personal with London's lost and lonely, muttering to themselves; too close to some very smelly people, including oddly one or two who were extremely well dressed, proving that a good sartorial state does n't always mean an equivalent olfactory one.

But tonight, coming home on the 148, was a fresh, new number: a somewhat overweight woman in an adult sized fluffy romper suit. From what I could make out from the four or five minutes we were sharing the same seat on the top deck, this was not a stunt or exhibitionism or someone en route to a party, this looked to be her normal life.

My age has me plumb in the middle of the"squashed generation"; those of us around our forties and fifties sandwiched between anxieties of ailing parents and the boisterous, sometimes surly demands of young adults creeping up behind. Pressure here, pressure there. It's a much remarked cultural observation. And most will segue through the three stages.

It's being in it, the filling in the generational sandwich, that I think, and I say this purely from observation (I'll clarify exactly why later), is potentially the most poignant because people are leaving. Kids become autonomous. they become people in other words; angry, passionate, excitable, effervescent, hopeful, invincible, moody, everything that goes with the great state of being human.

We also start to lose those who brought us here: our parents. Someone I know, a fine, happy spirited, deeply amiable person who carries an aura with her wherever she goes, a woman of great and sincere sensitivity, and a "squashed generation" member too, quite unexpectedly, lost her mother a few weeks ago.

Her heart aches. In an e-mail she wrote the simplest, tenderest sentences on how she felt. Her mum died on the final day of her holiday in a country several thousand miles away. Her words are few, unadorned and of the heart,  plain yet so pure, and they express unequivocally the depth of love she had for her mother: "...she died, away from me.."

I know exactly what weight these words carry, just what they symbolise: that she wanted to hold her mum, see her, laugh with her, chatter with her, see her again. And she can't. These five words have n't left me since I read them this morning. They echo with inexplicable feeling.

Bereavement is a room you never want to enter. I know: both of my parents passed away and to this day I still feel their absence.

When I don't have a book or something to read on public transport then it's whatever is going around me that's going to get my attention.

Bouncing back from Richmond on the 391, I could n't escape the conversation going on in the seat in front. It was two people, clearly somewhere in the warm glow of romance: a tall South African man, quite elegantly dressed in a well made brown three quarter length coat with a lighter brown polo neck underneath; his partner had her hair pinned back ( the seats are so close on the 391, I could see how many pins there were: three.) and was as comfortably dressed as the man.

There was a little, at times, coy, question and answer session going on between them. She wondered what type of clothes he looked, the styles, short sleeves, V necks, long sleeve t shirts, what colours did he like. Like me he was an earth toned creature: browns, chocolates, greens, some shades of blue, and no, he did n't mind if she from time to time pointed something out in store when they were shopping, or even bought the odd item.

Love. What a beautiful thing.

I saw these two a few days ago in Rome.If it is an illusion then it's one of the best I've ever come across.

Personally, I'm suspending all rationality and assuming it's something entirely other -not inexplicable - simply a testament instead to the power of mind over matter. And this was some effort, barely a movement from either during the twenty minutes or so I was watching, they'd clearly been in the same stance before I arrived and were still when I turned to leave.

They were n't the only pair I spotted in Rome, I ran across another on the Via Del Corso on my way back t my hotel. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is a little something going on. But for me, belief remains suspended; both are exhibiting a strength, endurance and spirit that I can only marvel at. Somethings are better left.

Interestingly, the hyper concentrating duo in this photo had approached their site with acumen and foresight, they were on the bridge just before the Castel San Angelo, which guards one of the main thoroughfares to that seat of spiritual power - the Vatican.

Those five days I've just spent in Rome were among five of the most enchanting days I've ever had. Rome rendered me mute. Speechless. Everyday was discovering a new joy, something utterly unexpected. I am in love with the eternal city. Inamorata. Why? Who knows. Who cares. It's a sensory thing, inchoate, fugitive; it could be a vapour, or a perfume, something too strong, yet paradoxically too fragile, to break down into actual parts. It's so stealthy, like a magical kiss in some fairy tale, utterly transformative.

I felt for the whole time that I was there that I was in the original City, the foundation City, the place where it all began. It's the only city I've been to which makes two thousand year old London or Paris feel young. Mesopotamia is acknowledged as holding the the seeds of the oldest recognised urban settlements; but Rome surely trumps that. Where else can you see millenia old frescoes in the catacombs or the basement of the Basilica di San Clemente and then see almost the same faces you've just seen walking past you on the street or stood at the bar drinking coffee

I'll leave the final word to Goethe, who in his Italian Journey, wrote: "Now at last I have arrived in the First city of the world"

Another turn of the wheel for me this week: my birthday, so I'm having a short break. I'll post if I can. I'm still not decided whether I'm taking my i-Pad with me. If not then I'll be depending on the bounty of whatever internet cafe I can flush out in Rome.

It's happened again: yet another near St Francis of Assis moment as Terry and I trudged through a bitterly cold Hyde Park trying to work out just exactly where in the this 350 acres of park, the resident Tawny Owls call home.

A quest in vain as it ultimately turned out; wherever they were, we were n't.

Still if one door closes, another really does open, and opens wide. We were given what might as well have been the avian equivalent of a cavalry escort. Birds popped up and out of everywhere; like miniature dust storms, whirling through the undergrowth.

Birds of every stripe and colour filled the bushes as we strode through the park. Close enough for them to have eaten out of our hands. They were fearless. It was something almost out of a Disney cartoon where humans and animals chat away; that surreal. 

Even the normally raucous parakeets put a sock in it as they drew nearer to us. So near in fact that either one of us could have made for a very passable Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder had we thrown an arm out.

This has happened before at the Barnes Wetland centre where we were virtually shadowed by a roving, darting band of extraordinarily acrobatic long tailed tits for hundreds of yards.

Why is this happening? 

Had there been any more of us squinting up at a non-descript bare branched tree tucked into the corner of just as a bland an end terraced house in South Ealing then the police would have probably pulled out the crowd barriers. Eight buff coloured waxwings sat out the occasional shrieks of wind tunnelling down South Ealing Road the way I imagine surfers wait for the next big rise. Riding each pulse before skimming down to a small tree draped with reddish coloured berries which is effectively Waxwings' spinach; gives 'em strength, health and vigour.

And these are hardy birds. Driven over from Scandinavia by hunger, they've irrupted into the UK in roving bands on the look out for waxwing ambrosia - anything red and in berry form. So this means they've dropped into some of the most unexpected areas - car parks, city centre churchyards and a temporary colony of eight, perhaps a few more, outside South Ealing station.

They are glorious birds. Buff, almost pinkish breasts, splashes of Matt yellow on wing tips and tails; that Scandinavian dress sense again, as if they've all seen the same costume designer, each one kitted out in the same thick, gorgeously knitted jumper that every Danish or Swedish actor wears in some Scandinavian noir series. Topped off with a jaunty cockade; they're one of the few birds I know who actually look like they have a feather in their cap.

People of South Ealing look up. There's beauty above.

The compulsion to read is this: once you have it you never lose it. As constant as a sunrise, as abiding as a sunset. Mine's been there since I can remember, in fact the first fragments of any real memory involve reading and the last will, no doubt, have a book in there somewhere.

I was talking about this with a friend a few evenings ago in the cafe of the National Gallery, doing my best to sketch out  exactly what is so intoxicating about reading. The shape of what I was trying to say did n't come out; feelings are n't easily captured sometimes, so the sense was there, but the taut description, which is what I wanted remained out of focus.

But you're never more than a few books away from the sentence or the statement that pulls the ether down, grabs it with both hands, moulds it, bends it, and throws out the exact shape of what you were hoping for. So what has the compulsion to read done for me? This: "My mind has travelled through words and books to places where my feet will never touch the earth" This is the most heartfelt and the most accurate explanation of what words have meant for me. Taken with joy from a short story by Ishmael Beah, an exciting writer from Sierra Leone now living in New York City.